Guild Pain Point #5 — Silo Mentality
The tunnel vision of our minds, teams and organizations
Author: Sean Moffitt . Grey Swan Guild Founder and CEO, Cygnus Ventures
“Silos build the wall in people’s minds and create the barrier in organizations’ hearts.” — Pearl Zhu
Grey Swan Guild’s Seven Pain Points for Making Better Sense of the World
These are the seven things that confront our mission. We obsess about them. We strive to overcome them. We seek to navigate around them. We hunger to alleviate the bad consequences of them. They are pain points.
We are profiling our fifth one here — it is the scourge of innovation, leads to tunnel vision, and can exist in our own minds, across teams and organizations, it’s the pain point of Silo Mentality.
V. Silo Mentality
We have characterized our Guild’s proposition as hovering above your personal life, company life, local community and industry. We have actually pioneered a term entitled “a fifth place” to describe a different type of multidisciplinary entity we have created that gathers together 50+ types of professionals across borders and any other identities of consequence.
In the true spirit of Guilds, the idea is to provide professional craft- and skills-building, wider views and challenges to established notions, exposure to leading edge thinking and building ventures that solve important problems. Our structure tries to rise above the perils of silo mentality and insider-outsider ways of thinking and hard-edged, curtained off identities. Unique to our Guild experience, the cross-disciplinary “community” of professionals is played back as the top reason for joining our Guild.
When it comes to intelligence, our Guild attempts to overcome silo mentality by having interdisciplinary wedges (teams in Guild lexicon) spearhead our research. With Guild events, we host one large event every month under the banner of twelve very different themes (culture, workplace, futures, leadership, impact, humans, marketplace, learning, economy, sensemaking, innovation, technology). to get people out of their comfort zones and one-track minds. With Guild community, we host new member onboarding Regattas that bring together a wide variety of prospective members from the very start. On our Guild ventures, we operate as a meritocracy, providing more access, influence, remuneration and extrinsic benefits based on effort and outcomes, not based on backgrounds, relative experience or some preferred designation or discipline.
Facets of our Pain Point Silo Mentality:
In times of uncertainty and big sped-up changes, it’s important we are equipping professionals with the mindsets, knowledge and tools to be able to dance across disciplines. Silos can cause us to be blind to the obvious, and also blind to our own blindness. Despite the possibility of being clearer in our messaging and sharper in our programming, Grey Swan Guild prefers to be a standard bearer for multi-disciplinarity and delighting in seeing what happens when we collide together different minds. We try to overcome the worst parts of silo mentality:
- Discipline Myopia: professions, designations and departmental allegiances that operate independently with limited interaction and coordination, focusing solely on their specific functional acumen and goals.
- Geographic Myopia: different locations on one hand resist the benefit of global exchange of ideas instead developing their own beliefs, while at other times being unable to ascertain the key important distinctions between regions.
- Knowledge Myopia: critical knowledge and expertise are confined to specific individuals or teams, walling off others to access and leverage of these insights.
- Sectoral Myopia: professionals from different verticals of the economy (e.g., healthcare, education, technology, CPG, manufacturing) operate in isolation, with limited collaboration, cross applications and shared knowledge between them.
- Political Myopia: political left-right orientations and philosophical movements work in opposition to each other, prioritizing partisan beliefs over true knowledge, leading to dispute of the facts that do exist, any opportunities for common ground and bi-partisan solutions.
- Company Environment Myopia: differences in culture, method and challenges that exist between large civic and institutional staff, corporate employees, medium-sized organizational talents, startup entrepreneurs and gig economy participants gets magnified; people frivolously profile others based on professional pedigree.
- Cultural and Gender Myopia: professionals on one hand downplay the complex socio-cultural factors that exist between cultures and genders and on the other hand, deny the common opportunities and issues that confront them, and the value of peership and collaboration that is possible.
- Single Issue Myopia: professionals (and frequently activists and ideologues) who see the world through only one prism, and chronically try to guide back discussions and factor analyses to the same root cause.
- Technology Myopia: professionals who cannot bridge divides on issues and people based on level of digital competence or choice of different technology standards, platforms, and ecosystems, hindering collaboration, human-tech balance, and interoperability.
- Thinking/Doing Myopia: divides between academics, thought leaders and researchers on one side with practitioners, makers and builders on the other, denying the co-dependency, cross-pollination potential and shared stakeholder value shared between the two efforts.
- Loneliness: the general lack of professional affiliation and community that is held among a majority of our workforces, especially with people who have faith in leading edge ideas, believe in shifting cultures and emerging workplaces, and hold supportable, but less-than-majority held key opinions; the lack of safe havens for their unique concepts frequently extinguishes them.
The Guild’s Response to Silo Mentality
The Guild tries to bring down silos by attracting cross-disciplinary talents, operating in multidisciplinary teams and chasing down intelligence, events and ventures that require interdisciplinary thinking and doing. Specifically, we do this through:
Experiences — Craft-Building Series: we have hosted over 100+ skill building sessions that are wide and dispersed, intentionally randomizing our topic range alphabetically across shared multidisciplinary challenges (e.g. our “As” Craft-Building Series forums : were Ambition & Drive, Ambiguity & Managing Uncertainty, Attention & Concentration and Adaptability & Flexible thinking).
Intelligence — The Global League of Sensemakers: housing a wide standing panel of 400+ researchers, analysts, futurists, economists, sensemakers and other curious types who answer our Weathervane Intelligence initiatives and resource our intelligence venture teams.
Community — GSG Book Club: a monthly collective of people who tackle books that challenge established views, and reviewing literary works that reach across many different professional and industry divides.
Ventures — Cygnus Thoughtleaders: a soon-to-be launched executive thoughtleader bureau who are uniquely able to provide counsel to boards, executive teams and all staff employee gatherings and project teams given their T-shaped leadership DNA, functional agnosticism and cross-disciplinary backgrounds.
Read up on the other Pain Point posts
Pain Points for Making Sense of the World Overview :
The Seven Guiding Catalysts for the Grey Swan Guild
Uncertainty — Guild Pain Point #1
Bias & Noise — Guild Pain Point #2
Negativity — Guild Pain Point #3
Superficiality — Guild Pain Point #4
Grey Swan Guild — the Calls to Action
If you have an interest in responding to uncertainty, our pain point chasing and our particular Guild view on the world. You have a few options.
First, join our Grey Swan Guild LinkedIn page Grey Swan Guild — we post daily, usually surfacing interesting observations that respond to our pain points, giving you a first view of what’s upcoming, telling you how to get involved, or recapping what cool things we have just done.
Secondly, if you want to get higher up on our radar and profile your interests, declare your intentions and potentially take on a leading or contributing role in the Guild, there is only one way to do it. Become an official member. Here’s the form.
If your enthusiasm still remains whetted, and you love going below, around and above the surface of our world’s biggest issues, become part of our standing panel of 400+ analytical and observational minds. Become a Global Sensemaker. Here’s the form.
Not satisfied with just thinking, but would rather solve these pain points too. We have designed a ventures wing to our guild called Cygnus Ventures that has embarked upon twelve different ventures to get after solutions and opportunities that tackle making better sense of the world through our well-defined pain points. Become a Cygnus Venturist. Here is th
Trying to find the central thread and on-ramp to participation and still have questions? Each and every month, usually in the first week of the month, we host new member onboarding Regattas, where we meet you face to face and share in why we exist, what we do, who you are, explore some interactive queries and answer every one of our queries. Join us at our next regatta in Jul. Here’s the link.
